From: Michael Novick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> At 12:16 PM 3/8/99 -0800, you wrote: >MIKE. Does anybody know why they killed so many people? At the time I knew that >entire villages were razed. The worst genocide since the Jews ocurred there. BUT >WHAT did army want? Was it just that they were coked up? Did they believe the >rumors of guerilas there? Did they want the land, end up with the land? WHAT WAS >the reason to exterminate every man woman and child and even DOG there? in Quiche >province? > > Reply from MN: Genocide -- same as in the US -- the Guuatemalan system ahs always been an apartheid type system of European colonization of a substantial indigenous majority. The insurgency and native resistance proved intractable and irrepressible by 'normal' dirty war tactics, and persisted in face of over 40 years of CIA guided assassinations, imprisonments, torture etc; Rios-Monnt came in with the backing of the US Christian Right to up the ante with his strategy of replacing the carrot and stick with the torch, and that's been the story since, with only recent adoption of a 'reconciliation' strategy akin to that in Salvador and Nicaragua. One of my beefs with folks who claim the militias in the US are a parallel to the Zapatistas or other insurgencies in Latin America is that the militias in this country are in fact a direct descendant of the 'white hand' death quads in Guatemala. Larry Pratt, of Gun Owners of America went down to Guatemala with Christian right dough, on a mission certainly approved if not directed by Reagan's NSC [this is the same time period as the contra war in Nicaragua -- the CIA cocaine dealing financed that when Congress briefly tied the purse strings] to pick up the slack when Congress cut off all military aid to the Guatemalan genocidal dictatorship. Pratt organized something called 'armed civilian patrols,' in which they evangelized, Christianized some of the indigenous and set them to do battle with the indigenist and liberation theology influenced insurgency forces, going beyond even what the army was capable of, because it was fratricidal. Pratt came back to the US following this experience and wrote a book about it called "Armed People Victorious" (also referencing Gen John Singlaub's similar experience in the Philippines funding peasant opposition to the Moro Liberation Front and the New People's Army). He then helped convene a meeting in Estes Park Colorado with white supremacist Christian Identity minister pete Peters which called for the application of this strategy to the US -- christianizing and arming people into christian militias -- not to oppose government counter-insurgency but to supplement it, to target not the high and mighty but the oppressed -- women, gays, immigrants and other handy scapegoats. The chickens are coming home to roost, as Malcolm X once said in a nor unrelated context (the assassination of JFK). In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. People Against Racist Terror (PART) PO Box 1055 Culver City CA 90232 Tel.: 310-288-5003 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> URL: <http://people.we.mediaone.net/part2001/index.html> Order our quarterly: "Turning the Tide:Journal of Anti-Racist Activism, Research & Education" End the racist death penalty! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Alejandrina Torres, and all political prisoners and P.O.W.'s in U.S. prisons! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Have you visited our new web site? http://www.onelist.com Onelist: Helping to create Internet communities
